On the afternoon of February 8, Aman Hussain’s brother Anas, a student of Class 8, was not at home when violence broke out in Haldwani, the largest city in Kumaon region of Uttarakhand, and a gateway to Nainital, one of the most populated hill stations of north India. Worried that Anas would get caught in the melee, his father Zahid Hussain, a 48-year-old construction material supplier, went looking for him.
“Minutes later, our neighbours told us that my father was lying in a pool of blood,” recalls Aman. “I took him to a clinic nearby. My stomach turned when I saw Anas lying there on a stretcher with a bullet injury below his waist.”
That evening, Anas and Zahid bled to death. They were two of the four people who died during the violence that day. A fifth victim, who had been shot, succumbed to injuries days later.
Leading up to the deaths was a single event. A few hours earlier, on that cool afternoon in the foothills of the Himalayas, municipal authorities proceeded towards the Banbhoolpura area with bulldozers and other heavy machinery to demolish the Mariyam mosque and the Abdul Razzaq Zakariya madrasa. Scores of angry residents, including children, gathered at the spot to protest against the demolition. The two structures were built decades ago on government land in an area popularly known as Malik Ka Baghicha, which, the authorities alleged, had been encroached on by a contractor named Abdul Malik.
The officials claimed that the demolition was taking place as part of an ongoing “anti-encroachment drive”. The stated aim of the drive was to free acres of Nazool land in order to broaden roads or build schools and bus stops. Nazool lands once belonged to kings and were later taken over by the British. After Independence, the British vacated these lands, but as there was no proper documentation of many parcels, they came to be owned by the government. Nazool land is often leased out to entities for 15 to 99 years for public purposes. Uttarakhand has over 2.42 crore square metres of Nazool land.
The district administration claimed that the structures under their scrutiny were not registered as a mosque and school and were illegal. They contended that they had sent notices to the “encroachers”, giving them an opportunity to prove ownership of the land. When ownership could not be proved, the authorities decided to proceed with the demolition “as per due process,” they said.
The police, who were accompanying the officials, managed to disperse the crowd. The demolition began and the structures, one painted green and the other cream, turned into rubble.
Minutes later, violence broke out. The police claim that the residents began throwing stones, while the men and women allege that the police began to lathi-charge them. Violence surged and the mob allegedly set fire to a police station. Dozens of vehicles, both government and private, were burnt and around 100 police personnel were injured. Several civilians received bullet, stone, and cane injuries.
To maintain law and order, the authorities imposed a curfew in the area which includes at least 8,000 homes and 50,000 people. They issued shoot-at-sight orders. Paramilitary forces were deployed, forcing residents, including those whose relatives had been admitted in hospital, to remain confined within their homes. Three First Information Reports were filed and 5,000 unidentified people booked for rioting and arson. Malik was named as the main accused.
‘He was shot in the back’
When his father Mohd Israr, 55, was struck by a bullet that day and admitted in the Sushila Tiwari government medical college, Mohd Suhail, 23, stayed with him for five straight days. His mother Naseema, younger sister, and wife remained at home due to the curfew. As Internet had been suspended in the area, the family could not even call one another on video. On the fifth day, Israr, who operated a goods vehicle, died.
Israr’s younger son Amaan is distraught. “My mother was brought to the hospital only to see my father’s body,” he says. Amaan alleges that the police fired the bullet that got lodged in his father’s skull.
The fourth victim of the violence was Mohd Shabban, 22, who ran a grocery shop. Much like how Hussain went in search of Anas on the day of the violence, Shabban went looking for his brother Shadab, says Riaz Mohammed, his brother-in-law. “He was shot in the back,” says Riaz.
The victims’ relatives say the administration ignored the intelligence inputs which had suggested that tensions may flare up if the demolition was carried out.
Faheem Qureshi, a driver, too died that day. But his son, Javed, says that the motive for the killing was revenge. “My brother was not killed by the police or by rioters. Our neighbour, Sanjay Sonkar, has had an issue with us for a long time over the construction of a wall. He got an opportunity to take revenge that day as shots were being fired from all directions,” he says. The family has submitted a written complaint to the police against Sonkar but no action has been taken so far, they say.
The Senior Superintendent of Police, Haldwani, Prahlad Naryan Meena, says all the deaths are being investigated. It is during such an investigation that the police found that Prakash Singh, who had also been included in the list of victims on the day of the violence, was in fact murdered.
“Prakash was in a relationship with the wife of a police constable,” says a senior police official involved in the investigation. “He happened to reach Haldwani on the day of the violence to meet her. The constable shot him dead and threw his body near the railway tracks, about a kilometre from Banbhoolpura. Initially, it appeared that he was also killed in the violence. Sabne behti Ganga me haath dhoya (everyone tried to benefit from the situation),” he says.
A deserted city
Days after the violence, there are charred vehicles in every second lane of Banbhoolpura. The windows of the mostly small, single-storey, and poorly constructed houses are cracked or broken. The lanes are deserted. The stench from the ditches, which have not been cleaned, has forced everyone to cover their faces. The district administration says the area has been cleaned and essential supplies provided to people.
Most houses are locked from the outside; their occupants fled Haldwani when the violence broke out. Many men have been picked up by the police for interrogation or have run away fearing arrest. The women have stayed.
Hina Bibi, 24, is six months pregnant. She runs from lane to lane asking for cooking gas. The paramilitary forces guard every corner and she cannot take the risk of violating the curfew as she has left her two-year-old child at home.
Anam Ali, 28, is inconsolable. She holds the hand of one child and carries the second in her arms. Anam alleges that the police barged into her house on February 10, two days after violence broke out in Haldwani, thrashed her husband Rizwan, and took him away. She has neither seen nor heard of him since. “Please ask them to take me as well,” she pleads while sobbing. “My husband is innocent. I can’t live without him.”
Firoza, whose nephew Mohd Shoib was beaten by the police, claims that the participants in the violence were not residents of Banbhoolpura.
At Abid Siddiqui’s single-storey house, located 200 metres from the demolition spot, a paper pasted on the door announces that he saved the life of a constable, Lakshmi, who was attacked by the mob on February 8. It also provides her phone number.
“I had saved the life of the constable when a mob was beating her up. She was bleeding profusely. I pulled her into my house, gave her first aid, and helped her rejoin her squad after the situation was brought under control. I had to paste this paper on the wall after the police attempted to pick me up as well,” says Abid. He alleges that police action against men, women, and children continued for days after the violence.
Taking a communal turn
Pankaj Upadhyay, the municipal commissioner of Haldwani who was transferred to Udham Singh Nagar days before the violence, says the anti-encroachment drive will continue. He believes that the violence was aimed at challenging the state machinery. “Those who are calling the demolition an attack on a particular community must know that our drive to free Nazool land has been going on since May 2023. We have demolished over 250 structures, including temples, shops, and houses. We razed the famous Rokhariya Baba temple in January. In Metropole, we demolished 164 houses built on Nazool land. We will not bow down to rioters,” he says.
Condemning the violence, Sumit Hridayesh, the Congress MLA from Haldwani, says everyone involved in the violence must be punished. He alleges that the district administration and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led State government are unnecessarily playing politics over the incident.
“I heard some officials saying that the violence was an attempt to threaten the State which had passed the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) a day earlier. I found this vague and irresponsible. Why would only Haldwani’s Banbhoolpura, which has many Hindus, and no other place in the State have a problem with the UCC?” Hridayesh feels that the administration was playing with religious sentiments by going ahead with the demolition of the mosque without taking religious leaders into confidence.
The violence, which the administration insists is not communal, has taken a communal turn in other parts of the city. Nawab Khan, 48, who rented a house in the Chaupla Chauraha area, says he was threatened to vacate the house by a resident named Manu Goswami, who aims to be a politician. “Manu told me that Muslims will not be allowed to live in Hindu-dominated areas. My children have exams. Where will I go on such short notice?” Khan was finally forced to move out of the place on February 15 as the police issued a challan to his landlord.
Goswami says he harbours no ill-feeling towards Khan, but if a Muslim lives in an area dominated by Hindus, “it will create tension”.
Ahrar Baig, a lawyer practising in the Uttarakhand High Court, says that Banbhoolpura has been a “target” for some time. Last year, about 4,000 families, mostly Muslims and Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes living in a 2 km stretch along the railway track in Banbhoolpura, were served eviction notices by the Indian Railways on the orders of the High Court. The Railways claimed that the houses had been built illegally on its land. After weeks of protest, the residents moved the Supreme Court. The matter is now sub judice.
Baig is representing many families in this case. “During that time, the government told the High Court that there is no Nazool land in Haldwani. Now it has demolished the mosque and madrasa saying the land is Nazool,” he says.
According to an interim fact-finding report published by the advocacy group Association for Protection of Civil Rights, Muslims across the State are being targeted. The members of the body visited Haldwani on February 14, and concluded that the violence was a result of “a steady rise in communal tempers...over recent years.” It went on to say, “The State government...and radical right wing citizen groups have together contributed to a highly polarising narrative.... One strand of this discourse is about creating Uttarakhand as a Devbhoomi, the holy land for Hindus, which would have no place for other religious minorities. Other strands of this divisive discourse include unsupported extravagant claims of a series of jihads allegedly waged by the Muslim population of the State including love jihad, land jihad, vyapar jihad, and mazaar jihad. One consequence of this discourse has been calls for economic and social boycotts of Muslims.”
In 2023, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami launched a State-wide drive to remove encroachments from forest land under which over 500 mazaars (Muslim shrines) were demolished. The government says scores of temples were also razed. Dhami stated a few days after the incident in Haldwani that the situation was under control and a police station would come up at the demolition site.
Those who suffer
In the medicine ward of the Sushila Tiwari government medical college, Shahnawaz Ahmed sits next to his brother Sarfaraz, 26, who was shot in the chest on February 8. Sarfaraz, a tailor, had gone to deliver clothes to a client near the demolition site when the incident took place.
Five days since he brought Sarfaraz to the hospital, Shahnawaz has been wearing the same blood-soaked clothes. In his hurry, he forgot his wallet. He barely has money to buy clothes or even eat two meals. He sleeps on the floor without a blanket every night. “It is only the poor who get punished every time, whether during a pandemic or an incident of violence,” he says. “It is better to die than to be poor in India.”
